#BostonSpotted: A Chat with Web Agency Verndale

Get to know experience technology company Verndale and how they contribute to the hustle of the Hub.

Agency Spotter is all about helping marketers and agencies get to know each other. Discover the talent that makes Boston’s Verndale a place where experience technology is artfully combined with content to produce award-winning, customer experiences.

How did Verndale get its start as a web and digital agency?

Verndale started off back in 1998 with four entrepreneurs in an apartment located on Verndale Street in nearby Brookline, MA. Starting out as more technical by nature, Verndale focused on educating prospective clients on why having a web presence was important in the escalating digital age. Practicing what they preached, as the technology and digital landscape continued to drastically change, Verndale saw the need to scale with the shift and over the years adopted a strategy and experience design practice, on top of their current technology practice.

Verndale is an Experience Technology Company. In layman’s terms, what does that mean?

An Experience Technology Company builds powerful, connected and interactive experiences for their clients by combining the three core capabilities needed for any project to be successful – strategy, which entails the discovery of client’s needs, and building a roadmap to help them achieve both their short and long-term goals; design, which visually and architecturally creates the assets needed to satisfy the roadmap and goals; and technology, which allows us to build the design and experience originally mapped out.

Can you tell us a little about one of Verdale’s more unique engagements?

A great example is an interactive drum cymbal playing experience for our client Zildjian, which was built on our partner Sitecore’s Experience Management Platform. The client’s digital marketers were looking to use their website to understand who their users were so they could then personalize the experience on and off the site. The outcome allowed Zildjian to automate communication with users across all channels and easily gather in-depth analysis on visitor behavior, site traffic and campaign success.

What’s the biggest challenge to designing a successful user experience?

Content, content, content. Even when creating a new approach to designing experiences that no one has ever seen before, the biggest challenge is not only what to say, but how to say it so that each individual persona, marketing channel and geographically positioned audience can act upon that content. In the world of experience management platforms, you design the content to craft the experience. Without that content, the end result is flat and not successfully positioned.

Some of Verndale’s Boston employees enjoying summer.

Win any cool awards this year?

We’ve won some pretty awesome awards, all which are not only cool, but an awesome recognition:

Claire writes about strategy, insight, and advice to help inspire smart and savvy marketers. She completed her MBA at UMass-Amherst and has been a team memberat City Sports, MIT, and an organic farm in Maine. A former student-athlete at the University of Wisconsin, Claire now runs marathons, for fun! On her bucket list is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, dining at Per Se, and running the beautiful trails in New Zealand.

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